Seaside Improvisation
I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't
                                                                    want them, so I take them back
     and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists. The yard is dark,
the tomatoes are next to the whitewashed wall,
                                           the book on the table is about Spain,
                                                                                     the windows are painted shut.
Tonight you're thinking of cities under crowns
               of snow and I stare at you like I'm looking through a window,
                                                                                          counting birds.
                                                  You wanted happiness, I can't blame you for that,
and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy
        but tell me
you love this, tell me you're not miserable.
                                                          You do the math, you expect the trouble.
                  The seaside town. The electric fence.
Draw a circle with a piece of chalk. Imagine standing in a constant cone
                                         of light. Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless.
A stone on the path means the tea's not ready,
       a stone in the hand means somebody's angry, the stone inside you still
hasn't hit bottom.
from the book CRUSH: 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION/ Yale University Press
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
This is an early poem in my first book. It’s uncanny how much foreshadowing there is here. Counting the birds inside someone is the premise of my second book. I didn’t realize it was here the whole time. I didn't know what to do with my hands in Crush: they kept turning into birds. In my second book the birds landed. And they started talking.

Richard Siken on "Seaside Improvisation"
Alina Stefanescu on Alice Notley

"Poetry is the medium where the question 'where am I?' is inseparable from the story of what I am and what we have done. Poetry is the refusal of time-space that separates the living from the dead. And sometimes, poetry is the woman on a porch at night, her tongues loose and 'waggling,' the serpents rising from the roof of her mind if only to writhe across the scalp’s surface before slithering onto the page. Alice Notley taught me that. She keeps teaching."

via PERIODICITIES
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
What Sparks Poetry:
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. on Drafts 


"What was this? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Had it not been in my notebook, in my handwriting, between two journal entries that I did recall writing, I would have tried to dismiss it somehow. But there it was. It would not be trifled with, so I put aside the various poetry experiments and series on which I’d been working and stepped into its weird lyric space-time of After the operation....
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency